Biological environments are noisy, chaotic, and highly damped (ref 1; incorporated by reference in its entirety). Transporting particles under those circumstances is a challenge, for which nature developed molecular motors, such as the myosin-actin system responsible for muscle contraction (ref. 2; incorporated by reference in its entirety), the kinesin molecular walker (ref. 3; incorporated by reference in its entirety) and ATP synthase (ref 4; incorporated by reference in its entirety). Such systems utilize asymmetry to obtain directional motion from non-directional chemical energy in the presence of strong damping and thermal noise (refs. 5,6; incorporated by reference in their entireties) through a mechanism called “ratcheting”. Ratcheting is a non-equilibrium process that requires broken spatial and temporal symmetries (ref 6; incorporated by reference in its entirety) and an oscillatory driving potential that exerts no net force in the direction of transport, but maintains the system far from thermodynamic equilibrium. For example, in the myosin-actin system, thermal fluctuations of the myosin head on an elastic tether lead to occasional binding of the head to an actin filament, at which point thermal energy is transduced to elastic energy, and the filaments translate relative to one another. A chemical reaction-coupled conformational change in the myosin head upon translation induces release of the head from the actin filament, and renders the translation irreversible. The system thereby uses a chemical trigger to rectify random thermal motion (ref. 7; incorporated by reference in its entirety). The design principles of these biological systems are today being used to develop a variety of molecular machines (ref 8; incorporated by reference in its entirety), and to achieve, experimentally, ratcheting of micron-sized particles (ref 9; incorporated by reference in its entirety), and, in rare cases, cold atoms (ref. 10; incorporated by reference in its entirety), spin (ref 11; incorporated by reference in its entirety) and electrons (refs. 12,13; incorporated by reference in their entireties).